Virtual moments : social and spatial histories re-imagined in a video installation by Stan Douglas

Abstract

This study focuses on a single work within the oeuvre of the Canadian artist Stan Douglas, the two-channel video installation Win, Place or Show (1998). This piece is constructed as an infinitely-looping counterfactual narrative, set in a modernist social-housing unit in late-1960s Vancouver that was never in fact built. Two dockworkers inhabiting a cramped one-bedroom unit in this imaginary setting repeatedly argue, fight and reconcile, while our view of this action--filmed from twelve different camera angles--is randomized by a computer in real time as the story unfolds and repeats. My study will consider this work within a twofold problematic; firstly, the themes and strategies that form the work's conceptual basis will be examined and situated within an art-historical context, with respect to their correspondences within the whole of Douglas's body of work and the broader context of Vancouver-based photo-conceptual practices over the past several decades. Subsequently, the work will be analyzed within a range of theories respecting the concepts of space, time and their relation to the construction of narrative and visual culture, and by extension, to the production of everyday consciousness.